Becoming ꟻreak : a collective carnivalesque resistance through narrative re-imaginings of women’s experiences living with reproductive health conditions : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Abstract

(Re)produced within colonial and patriarchal knowledge systems, medical and psychological literature enacted on women’s reproductive health crafts a singular story of feminine pathology and excess. Medical constructions of women’s bodies position woman as freak to man, and an analytic review of the literature demonstrates how women with reproductive health conditions become figured as freakier versions of the freak. Through a freaky entanglement of embodied ambiguity, this research asks: how do women with reproductive health conditions that figure their abnormality subʌert pathologisation? Following this question becomes a collective narrative journey through a carnival, exploring how five women story their experiences living with reproductive health conditions. Guided by narrative inquiry, a freaking of academia and the collaborative process of the affective flows of meaning making, I materialise the political forces of figurations that open the possibilities for subʌersive transformations, telling embodied stories of being freak, freaking medicine and the potentials for embodied knowing through bearded ladies, fire-eaters and joyous freaky community. Through the transformative potential of freaking, I engage a response-able response to difference through the emergence of a new figure – partial, multiple, permeable. Together but not the same, we are becoming ꟻreak.